Sphinn is faster than Search Engine Land and SERoundtable

There's a lot of debate about the throttling at Sphinn. You need between 20 and 25 votes to make the home page. In practice it's hard to pick up that many votes without getting some sphinns from the elite and so you tend to need only 20. Some people say that this is too much and that the home page is too old.


If you look at my Google Reader trends you can see that Sphinn's "Hot Today" RSS updates more often than Search Engine Land and the prolific SERoundtable. In fact, Sphinn is clearly more than %50 "faster" than Search Engine Land on updates.

I can only conclude that the homepage on Sphinn is fairly fresh. The difference, of course, is the type of stories that make the homepage. I'm not in the Sphinn innner clique; I've been asked only twice for vote for a story and I've ignored the request twice, I have my favourite sphinners (Jill Whalen, DoshDosh, Lyndon, ViperChill, Sebastian, Harith and Tamar, to name many, are all very good) but my opinions on Sphinn haven't been diluted. I certainly don't always agree with the stories that do well - lists on basic SEO, small PPC, SMO, affiliates and domain information still do too well and insights into branding, corporate maneuvering, large scale PPC and international issues don't do well enough. I do, however, disagree that the homepage is stale. It clearly isn't.

I like Sphinn. I might not like all the stories but I like plenty of them. It's important to me that Sphinn is something more than Search Engine Land at a difference speed of update. I like the fact that some stories that Go Hot at Sphinn never really feature at Search Engine Land. I like the fact that some stories which fail to Go Hot at Sphinn sometimes make the SearchCap.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ya I like Sphinn too. There is always talk about how many Sphinns it should take in order for the frontpage to stay fresh. It's a fine line really considering they want news to exposure and be good information (meaning high sphinn counts required), but they also don't want it to take forever for something new and exciting to make the homepage. (ie. low sphinn count required)

So far the Sphinn team has done very well and taken a great approach to sphinn coutns as the moderators seem to be very open to discuss such levels and have a good understanding of what they want to accomplish when they pick a particular # of sphinns.
Jill said…
Agreed! I think Sphinn is doing a fantastic job, considering how new it is and how fast it's grown. Kudos to Danny, Michelle and the rest!

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